Let's be honest, neither "verse-drama" nor "poetic theatre" has an alluring ring, does it? I have to remind myself that actually I quite like that sort of thing. I don't know whether it's simply cultural – whether we subconsciously hear the word "poetic" as a synonym for "painfully slow" – or whether it's specific to when the word is attached to "theatre", another word with a rich tapestry of negative connotations (most commonly as a synonym for show-offy, or something dishonest). But I refuse to believe it's just me who hears the words "poetic drama" and first imagines something slowly woven from pastel shades of twee. It has an identity problem.

At first glance, poetic drama hasn't been having a great time of it for a while now. I remember being fascinated, when researching my book about the history of the National Student Drama festival , to read an account by Sir Harold Hobson of a session at one of the first festivals back in 1958, when Robert Robinson spent an afternoon tearing apart the work of Christopher Fry. The way Hobson tells it, this was the writing on the wall for the British verse-drama movement.

With hindsight, it can certainly look as if the Angry Young Men swept the genre off the British stage for years afterwards.

But is that really the case? On one hand, there are recent turkeys like Fram and Afterlife , appearing to confirm that we're still not terribly sure we want any verse at all back on stage just yet, thank you very much. On the other hand, leaving aside for the moment the striking fact that Britain's single most successful theatrical export and our national poet, Shakespeare, is mostly famous for his plays, which are largely written in verse – some of the best ever constructed in English – there has actually been quite a lot of poetry smuggled into theatre.

And finally, there's the work of such theatrical poets as Samuel Beckett and Sarah Kane; possibly two of the most influential dramatists of the last half-century.

Indeed, the more I think about it, far from poetry and theatre being opposed, when combined they can result in some of the most arresting work ever created for the stage.

After all, poetry can do precisely what even the best naturalistic reproduction of everyday speech can't – it can show us our language again. Poetry rejoices in the crackle of thought and the impact of word upon word. Rather than trying to "get right" what everyone already says, the job of the poet is to try to remake language enough to be able to say something new; to take all the words which are exhausted day-to-day and make them strange and unpredictable; to let them mean more. What better thing for performers to speak on stage? But, for God's sake, let's find a better name for it.